Don’t blame mental illness for the president’s behavior
As Donald Trump veers wackily from day to day, swearing before 30,000 Boy Scouts, publicly humiliating his attorney general and changing his mind on policy issues, he is raising alarm that the president of the United States might be mentally unstable.
Caught unaware of a live microphone, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., confided to Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, “I think he (Trump) is crazy.” Responded Collins, “I’m worried.”
At least we can agree Trump is not an inspirational leader on civics. In a speech roundly decried as “unhinged” to the Boy Scouts Jamboree in West Virginia, he said “what the hell,” went on and on about the November election, diatribed against Hillary Clinton and his predecessor, and told the Scouts not to believe the news media.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the first senator to endorse Trump’s presidency, is loyally carrying out Trump’s agenda to force sanctuary cities to turn over undocumented immigrants and fill the jails with drug addicts. In return, Trump has mounted a daily fusillade of Twitter and media attacks on Sessions.
Trump wants a new attorney general to fire special prosecutor Robert Mueller, who ran the FBI for 12 years and is investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Mueller is charged with finding out whether the Trump campaign worked with Russia to undermine Clinton, examining meetings between Trump family and campaign officials, including Sessions, and Russians loyal to Vladimir Putin, an official U.S. adversary.
Then, on a day the Senate was voting tensely on the nation’s crucial health-care insurance system, Trump suddenly tweeted that transgender Americans will no longer be welcome or tolerated in the armed services even though thousands of transgender people currently serve as soldiers, sailors, Marines and Merchant Marines.
The Defense Department, with no idea Trump’s decree was coming, is perplexed how to halt a policy under implementation. Former President Barack Obama announced last year that transgender people could serve openly in the military after a study concluded there would be minimal impact on military readiness or healthcare costs. Trump had promised the LBGTQ community would have no better friend than he would be as president.
Psychiatrists and psychologists are openly debating whether or not they should give opinions about Trump’s mental health or use phrases such as narcissistic personality disorder, egotist, misogynist or pathological liar in reference to him.
The American Psychoanalytic Association, with 3,500 members, concluded that psychoanalysts “should offer relevant psychoanalytic insights to aid the public in understanding a wide range of phenomena in politics, the arts, popular culture, history, economics, and other aspects of human affairs.”
But the APA urged “extreme caution” in making statements to the media about public figures, saying respect for individuals and the “limits of psychoanalytic inference” is essential.
In other words, it remains unethical for psychiatrists and others to diagnose the sanity of a public figure without personal interaction but it is good for society in general if experts discuss their interpretations of unusual behaviors.
Dr. Allen Frances, a professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University and a textbook author on mental illness, wrote to The New York Times, saying it’s unfair to the mentally ill to say Trump is sick. Trump “causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy.”
Rather than calling Trump psychiatric terms that don’t apply, Trump should be called out for his “ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.”
Trump’s “psychological motivations are too obvious to be interesting, and analyzing them will not halt his headlong power grab. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological,” Frances concluded.
Alas, the doctor makes sense. We will not be rid of the Trumpean menace to civility, gentility and rationality by blaming an illness such as narcissistic personality disorder that Trump does not have. Folks, we must face that we elected a boorish and dangerous threat to democracy, a man who thinks himself above the law and is causing us intense grief, chaos and embarrassment.
As president, he is an unmitigated disaster. But he is not mentally ill.